A bureaucrat who heartlessly enforces the rules, regardless of how stupid or harmful they are in the circumstances. These are the assholes who will send a teenage girl to jail on child porn charges for having a nude photo of HERSELF.

Can also refer to rule-lovers outside of government, such as store clerks who not only check your ID when you're buying alcohol, but also insist on carding everyone else standing too close to you in line and will refuse to sell it to you if some old man behind you that you've never met before doesn't have his driver's license on him.

The word was introduced by Richard Dawkins in "An Appetite for Wonder," originally inspired by the character J. Dundridge in the 1975 novel, "Blott on the Landscape."

Richard Dawkins wrote that, despite the fact that his mother was plainly standing in front of the dundridges of the colonial government in Kenya, they would not accept that as proof or her existence there. And they wouldn't give her a visa to leave because, "as far as their records showed, she had never arrived."